Becoming the Last of the Time Lords
by Special Patrol Groupie
Summary: The end of the Time War.


The Last of the Time Lords

I left Gallifrey of my own free will when I was about 350 years old, taking my granddaughter, Susan, and vowing never to return. Oh, there were dozens of reasons, ranging from the very petty to the very serious, but the overriding reason was to have nothing to do with the planning of the end of the universe. Even then I knew what was afoot. I was going to see as much of that universe as I could, and go backwards in time, avoiding the end, until Susan and I could both be assured of a full set of lives and a peaceful, natural death.

Yes, how very naïve of me.

Susan left – or not so much left as I threw her out of the nest. I regenerated, and my second self got himself in trouble and narrowly escaped vaporisation. I was in and out of trouble with the High Council for centuries, until the Time War began.

Suddenly, it didn't matter to them that I was a renegade, formally accused on three occasions of violating the Laws of Time. I was another body, another mind, and a sharp mind at that – one of the sharpest Gallifrey had produced, if I say so myself - and I was sent out to the front lines to defend my homeworld (and presumably the less-evolved species that I had befriended during my wanderings) against the soulless invaders.

All well and good. But the war dragged on and on and on ... I knew subjectively how long it seemed to me, but there really is no way to count the time when both parties can change outcomes they don't like by simply altering the past. We were not supposed to do that – but all's fair in love and war, as the humans say, and once the Daleks tried that trick, we did not scruple to refrain from retaliating in kind. I might go back 5,000 years one day, forward 2 million the next, backward 3 billion the following day – the only thing that was the same was that there was a battle waiting for me. We developed the means to yank other time travellers out of the Vortex and stop the Daleks that way, but it wouldn't be long until our enemies got hold of it.

It occurred to us – and, our spies told us, it had occurred to the Dalek commanders as well – that one sure way to end the war was to prevent the creation of the enemy in the first place. I had already been sent on a mission to do just this very thing, I realised with a shock – and I had failed. The consequences had never seemed so dire.

Then I got a most unexpected message from my worst enemy. Perhaps I should say my worst individual enemy. My worst individual _Gallifreyan_ enemy.

It took me some time to realise a message had been delivered at all, beyond a few paragraphs of sneering smugness, entirely typical of my onetime best friend. But in one of those acts of intuition I noticed that a certain algorithm made the introductory sentence of his communication start with my name – not "the Doctor," not "Theta Sigma," but my birth name, which almost nobody knows. The rest of it warned me that the plan to "evolve into higher consciousness" by destroying the rest of the universe was going to be carried out. He had given me plenty of notice, but now because I had ignored the message out of my preconceptions and in the immediate press of the war, I had maybe three hours to act before they did.

And I could only think of one thing, the final line of the decoded message from Koschei, the Master: _Gallifrey is no more than a tumour in the body of the universe that has to be cut out._

And only one sure solution was available on such short notice. I rushed into my TARDIS and set course for the Citadel of the Time Lords.

Under the Panopticon, a meeting hall in the Citadel, there lay the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole that was said to have been captured and put there by Rassilon himself. It provided all the energy Gallifrey needed to sustain itself – the power to travel through time; the power to regenerate any organic being's body (although we pretended it only worked on Time Lords, and then only a limited number of times) – but not, by itself, the power to destroy the universe. If let free, it would destroy Gallifrey, if not all the Kasterborous cluster.

So, to end the Time War once and for all, I decided I was going to let the Eye of Harmony loose. Then I was going to the relevant authorities to have a time lock put on the whole war so it wouldn't constantly repeat itself.

The Master once had tried to tap into the Eye of Harmony for his own selfish purposes – to grab a new set of regenerations – without knowing or caring what would become of Gallifrey to have a singularity like that loose. It's possible he didn't realise that the singularity would get loose, or thought he could prevent it from getting loose. In any event, I had stopped him. Now I was going to finish that work.

Yes, it was something of a trick to get the required artifacts to open the lock – a sash worn by the Lord President, and a staff he carried with him. But I managed.

I was able to trick the Chancellory Guards into chasing a false alarm. I broke into the safe where the sash and rod were kept. It set off an alarm, but I ignored it – soon it wouldn't matter. I had my TARDIS materialise in the Panopticon, right next to the spot where the Eye of Harmony lay. I stood in the doorway, the rod raised over my head like a javelin. I had one chance to hurl the rod into the lock – either it would strike home or it wouldn't. If it did, I'd slam the doors shut and make an emergency jump away from Kasterborous; if I missed, well, what happened next really wouldn't matter.

I stood in the Panopticon, looking at the spot, wearing the sash, standing with the staff, ready to hurl it into the fatal slot.

And I'd like to tell you I hesitated until the last possible second, by I don't like to lie. I hurled the staff, slammed the door shut and ended up in about 47259 BC, peacefully orbiting a red giant star. TARDIS' sensors, however, indicated that the throw had struck home and that the planetary crust had split open before we fully dematerialised.

With some careful calculations, the old girl and I turned up in a time-place where we could safely view Gallifrey's destruction via visible light. Yes, a telescope.

A very good telescope, though; Galileo would have given his eyeteeth for something able to discern individual people on the surface of a planet 30,000 light-years away. I caught some light reflected from an area on the opposite side from the Panopticon. Who knew what was about to happen? They thought it was another earthquake; then they realised, as every single structure fell around them, that it was much worse than just a quake; then the very planet fractured down to the core. The atmosphere escaped; people suffocated if they hadn't burned or been crushed. My mind filled in the sounds of their screams, from the eldest grandsires and granddames at the end of their 13th lives to the tiniest time tots.

The freed black hole ate up the remains of the planet that had been Gallifrey; then it sucked the armadas of both our fleet and the Daleks' into its insatiable maw. By then the Shadow Proclamation had raised enough advanced species to be able to recapture the Eye of Harmony, but they didn't know what to do with it. I went to them and showed them how to put it at the core of an uninhabited world, which to this day is strictly guarded by elite troops from all ends of the Shadow Proclamation. They didn't need to be persuaded to put a lock on the whole Time War. They conducted an inquest into my conduct, but didn't go any further after I gave my testimony about the High Council's plans to destroy the universe. They said they had no intention of sentencing me to anything, since I'd saved them and everything else that continued to exist, but that they feared it was likely that to be allowed to continue living was a horrible sentence – living on as the last of my kind.

"But I can't be the last of my kind," I said.

They shook their heads. They knew at any given moment how many beings inhabited the universe, and what their species were. I was the only Gallifreyan, Time Lord or no.

"I didn't expect that to be the outcome," I said, "but if I had, I still would have had to do it."

"Yes," they agreed sadly. "We would have done the same.

Gallifreyans don't sleep much, and don't dream often, but I had a dream not long after I resumed my wanderings. I dreamed the TARDIS had materialised in an asteroid field that had been Gallifrey. Something floated by that might have once been Mount Perdition. It had a certain cast to its summit that couldn't have been duplicated by chance. I remembered climbing Mount Perdition with Koschei, the future Master, when we were both about 35, and standing there looking around at the rich rippling waves of red grass, the immense ancestral seat of the House of Oakdown a dark dot among them; the silvery forests, the rust-coloured sky. All burnt away, torn from its wholeness, hurled into the cold dark vacuum by a son of its soil who had dared set himself up in judgment over the species it had spawned, and the rest of the life in the universe.

I woke up, feeling as Gallifrey might have felt when the Eye broke loose from its prison. There must have been some other way, I cried to myself, and the agony of realisation claimed me, split me open from the core to the surface, hurled bits of me into the void ...

Until I coalesced again.

"Still alive," I muttered, and heard something rather like a Northern English accent. I sprung up; the clothes I was wearing were too short for my new body. I wasn't comely now by human standards; my nose and ears were too big (again), and my hair was shorn short enough to please a drill sergeant in the Marines of the United States of America on Sol 3.

What was there for me to do but go on, live out my sentence? I found simple, plain, dark clothes in the wardrobe, put them on, forced myself to eat something, and wandered into the console room. I looked at the familiar controls of the TARDIS for a long time before I chose a heading and released the handbrake.


End file.
